Dutch Northern Wing gets broadband infrastructure

Broadband developments succeed each other rapidly in The Netherlands. Yesterday I was present at the presentation and the signing for a new broadband infrastructure for business, Breednet or translated Broadnet. The objective of the project is to offer affordable broadband connections for companies with fiber to the office at 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps. Fourteen municipalities, all located in the Northern Wing (see dar area on the map), will cooperate. The project will sponsored by the ministry of Economic Affairs, which will double the amount of money by the municipalities to 3,5 million euro, and will last 2 years.

The Northern Wing is in the Netherlands the region which clustered around Amsterdam. It has also been called the multimedia corridor. In the crossmedia study last year, it became clear that the Northern wing was a fast growing area in the field of creativity. So a project of digital market places was set up, but with Broadnet the focus has been re-directed. The basic idea is now to connect all existing local broadband networks with each other. So the Hilversum Glass fiber network will be connected with the Almere broadband network. So instead of routing data through internet connections participants in one local network can directly connect to participants in another local network. The basic idea is that new services will originate.

Target group of Broadnet are companies and institutes. In the Northern Wing there are 35.000 ICT and creative companies and institutes, which employ 178.000 people. The first groups are ICT companies and creative companies and institutes. Eventually there will be cross-overs from ICT to health care, education and trading. Basic effect will be the scaling up of the broadband network; a larger area for service companies and flexible and superior B2B traffic. Just think about the movie distribution company which forwards weekly 3 terabyte in movie content and now travels from a town without a glass fiber network with a load of 50 hard disks to Amsterdam Telecity to store the latest offer from Hollywood.

The project is a private public cooperation (in Dutch the acronym PPS is used). The private sector takes care of investing in the last mile; the public sector will bring together the demand and supervise the projects. The public and private sector together will offer services and communication/promotion of the project to companies and institutes.

Broadnet is seen as leverage for business. Companies and institutes – in first instance ICT and creative companies and institutes – can work faster and more securely. The project will also generate new business models and new services. Broadnet will offer new and powerful combinations of services. Some of these new services have already been demonstrated on local networks such as Fabchannel on the Amsterdam CityNet and the Institute for Image and Sound on the Mediagateway, but also tele-consultation in health care and camera surveillance in Utrecht.

Of course the last question is always what a connection will cost. Statements are always made about a reasonable price. In this case companies will pay 250 euro for a 100Mbps sync connection. Of course faster speeds such as 1Gbps will have another price tag. It is clear that the Broadnet project will have an effect of speeding up the uptake of broadband in the Northern Wing, to start with the ICT sector and the creative industry.

Blog Posting Number: 796

Tags: broadband, creative industry

The municipality of Brunssum in the South of The Netherlands (see coloured area in black oval) is one of the last of the cable Mohicans. It will offer its cable network for sale. Presently the network has 13.500 connections. Reason for the sale it the high costs of upgrading for the network.

Brunssum is one of the last municipalities in The Netherlands which still possesses and operates its own cable network. In the past fifteen years almost all municipal networks have been sold to regional operators like UPC, Casema and Kabelcom/aHome/Essent. These companies have been able to invest in triple play (television, telecom and internet). The present network of Brunssum badly needs an upgrade, if it wants to compete with these regional cable operators. The local network can not offer digital television. So the municipality will put it on the market.

This has been the trend for the last fifteen years and in this way regional operators are growing by threading municipalities in particular regions. This is the way UPC, Casema and Essent grew into cable operators with millions of users. The real high time was at the end of the nineties when regional cable operators paid 2250 guilders (roughly 1125 euro) or more for every subscriber. Brunssum expects revenues from the sale of the network for 10 million euro; this would be 740 euro per subscriber. The regional cable operator could earn that sum back easily – so was the reasoning – by offering digital TV, telecom facilities, internet and security services. But these days cable operators have to compete with new glass fibre consortia. So UPC is fighting the Citynet consortium in Amsterdam and in Nuenen UPC lost the majority of its subscribers to Ons Net, the private glass fibre consortium.

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More than 1 million households in The Netherlands have a television subscription combined with an internet subscription. Source: Vecai

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It is interesting to see that many of the fibre glass projects are also initiated by the municipalities. In the past they ran a cable network to avoid forests of antennas. Now they get involved in high speed networks for their own municipal services, education and hospitals; but their involvement is not that of an operator. They take shares in the private companies in order to have a say about the connections to their services and insure that the inhabitants get the best network possible. I guess that once glass fibre networks are common, up and running, that municipalities will sell their shares again to invest in other citizens’ services.

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Talking about internet by cable. I have a UPC subscription to Internet, Chello Classic, a package of 8 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up. That package is no longer sold; they never informed me by letter or e-mail. But what you get back or as compensation is not told on the webpage. On the webpage they guarantee the same optimal service, but lately they have been fiddling with the speed, as you can see from last month’s speed recordings through Speedtest.

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Blog Posting Number: 775

Tags: cable, glass fibre